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Month: February 2022

Stop the War!

Statement by the LINKE Berlin Internationals on Ukraine


28/02/2022

Deutsche Version unten

We condemn the Russian state’s aggression and demand that it withdraw immediately all its forces from Ukraine. We believe that there can be no justification for this aggression. We support Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, and the Ukrainian people in their resistance to the invasion. We stand with the Ukrainian people against this aggression, and embolden our efforts against fascisms and authoritarianisms in all their manifestations.

At the same time, we oppose a military offensive or any escalation of the conflict by NATO and the EU. Diplomatic solutions, not further military escalation, should be used to stop the war.

We reject the push to war over Ukraine. In nearly every war, working class people die for the greed and power lust of our rulers. Wars are usually fought in the name of one nation or another, but we agree with the Communist Manifesto when it says that working people have no country. For this reason, we also demand that all those fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine who wish to come to Germany are granted asylum.

The current escalation is a result of imperialism – where economic competition leads to military conflict. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the imperial ambitions of Vladimir Putin are threatening to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. In particular, the Western suggestion that Ukraine join NATO breaks an agreement that George H.W. Bush made with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.

The main task of socialists is to oppose the militarism of our own ruling class. As Karl Liebknecht said, the main enemy is at home. This means that we should also demand that Germany leaves the military alliance of NATO, as a step towards the dissolution of NATO.

Calling for an end to German militarism does not mean lining up alongside Putin or Russian nationalism. Putin has a track record of imperial intervention – in Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea. He is a neoliberal tyrant and is no friend of the working class – in Russia or elsewhere. Our answer is solidarity with the anti-war movement from below in Ukraine, in Russia, in the USA, and everywhere.

While we must oppose Putin, talking about his crimes without mentioning the crimes of NATO only feeds the drive to war. From the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Gulf Wars, claims of brutality on “the other side” have been used to feed the drive to war, while similar atrocities from “our side” are systematically ignored. The ruling classes throughout the world are brutal, and must be opposed through popular uprisings, not war.

Western politicians and the media have suddenly decided that they oppose militarism and expansionism. Yet from Korea to Vietnam, from Afghanistan to Iraq, NATO has a history of invading other countries and abusing human rights. Whatever the problem is, NATO cannot be any part of the solution.

We urge the media to avoid dangerous bias and to confront this dangerous situation sincerely. We’ve witnessed the way the Western media broadcast the Afghanistan and Iraq wars at the beginning of this century as a live TV show. We are currently seeing the same process in the Russian media. RT (Russia Today) announced that the invasion was carried out to “denazify” Ukraine. This is just a mirror image of “War on Terror” during the Bush administration. Only chauvinists will be convinced by this partisanship journalism.

Although Germany now has a Red-Green-Yellow government, this does not guarantee a peaceful foreign policy. A Red-Green government willingly supported Germany’s first military interventions since the Second World War – bombing former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. The German government has just broken a long-standing practise of not sending weapons to conflict zones. Sending German weapons to Ukraine only serves to add oil to the fire.

We make the following demands:

  • Stop the war

  • Stop the Russian aggression towards Ukraine

  • Germany should offer a safe passage and haven to deserters and other people fleeing Ukraine ohne wenn und aber

  • Germany takes in all refugees – whether Ukrainian, Afghan, Syrian, Yemeni or Somalian – and provides the same support system for all

  • NATO troops must withdraw from Eastern Europe

  • Germany should leave NATO as a step towards its dissolution

  • Demilitarize Europe

  • Better controls on all imperialist propaganda

  • Speed up the transition to renewable energies to break Germany’s dependence on Russian gas

We call on all Berlin LINKE Internationals members and supporters to take part in the many rallies for peace, a ceasefire, and disarmament.

The International Anti-War movement stands united. Hoch die Internationale Solidarität!

Stoppt den Krieg!

Erklärung von DIE LINKE Berlin Internationals zur Ukraine

Wir verurteilen die Aggression des Russischen Staates und fordern den sofortigen Rückzug aller Streitkräfte aus der Ukraine. Wir glauben, dass es keine Rechtfertigung für diese Aggression geben kann. Wir unterstützen die Unabhängigkeit und territoriale Integrität der Ukraine und das Ukrainische Volk in seinem Widerstand gegen die Invasion. Wir stehen mit dem Ukrainischen Volk gegen die Aggression und bekräftigen unsere Bemühungen gegen Faschismus und Autoritarismus in all seinen Manifestationen.

Gleichzeitig lehnen wir eine militärische Offensive oder jegliche Eskalation des Konflikts durch die NATO und die EU ab. Diplomatische Lösungen, nicht weitere militärische Eskalation, sollten den Krieg stoppen.

Wir lehnen den Vorstoß zum Krieg um die Ukraine ab. In nahezu jedem Krieg sterben Menschen der Arbeiterklasse für die Gier und Machtlust unserer Herrscher. Kriege werden üblicherweise im Namen der einen oder anderen Nation geführt, aber wir stimmen dem Kommunistischen Manifest zu, wenn es sagt, dass Arbeiter kein Vaterland haben. Aus diesem Grund fordern wir ebenso, dass allen vor der russischen Invasion in der Ukraine Fliehenden, die nach Deutschland kommen wollen, hier Asyl gewährt wird.

Die derzeitige Eskalation ist ein Resultat des Imperialismus, in dem wirtschaftlicher Wettbewerb zu militärischem Konflikt führt. Die Ausdehnung der NATO nach Osteuropa und die imperialen Ambitionen von Vladimir Putin drohen hunderttausende Leben zu kosten. Insbesondere der Vorschlag des Westens, dass die Ukraine der NATO beitritt, bricht eine Vereinbarung, die George H.W. Bush und Michail Gorbatschow 1990 trafen.

Die Hauptaufgabe eines Sozialisten ist es, den Militarismus der herrschenden Klasse abzulehnen. Wie Karl-Liebknecht sagte, der Hauptfeind steht im eigenen Land. Das bedeutet, dass wir auch fordern sollten, dass Deutschland die militärische Allianz der NATO verlässt als einen Schritt hin zur Auflösung der NATO.

Nach einem Ende des deutschen Militarismus zu rufen bedeutet nicht, sich neben Putin oder den Russischen Nationalismus zu stellen. Putin hat einen Streckenrekord der imperialen Intervention in Tschetschenien, Georgien und der Krim. Er ist ein neoliberaler Tyrann und ist kein Freund der Arbeiterklasse in Russland oder anderswo. Unsere Antwort ist Solidarität mit der Antikriegsbewegung in der Ukraine, in Russland, in den USA und überall.

Auch wenn wir uns Putin widersetzen müssen, nährt das Sprechen über seine Verbrechen ohne die Erwähnung der Verbrechen der NATO nur den Drang zum Krieg. Von der Kubakrise bis zu den Golfkriegen wurden Behauptungen zur Brutalität „der anderen Seite“ benutzt um den Drang zum Krieg zu nähren, während ähnliche Grausamkeiten „unserer Seite“ systematisch ignoriert wurden. Die herrschenden Klassen in aller Welt sind brutal und Widerstand muss durch Volksaufstände, nicht durch Krieg erfolgen.

Die westlichen Politiker und Medien haben plötzlich entschieden, dass sie Militarismus und Expansion ablehnen. Aber von Korea bis Vietnam, von Afghanistan bis Irak, hat die NATO eine Vorgeschichte der Invasion anderer Länder und des Missbrauchs von Menschenrechten. Was immer das Problem ist, die NATO kann kein Teil der Lösung sein.

Wir drängen darauf, dass die Medien gefährliche Vorurteile vermeiden und sich dieser gefährlichen Situation ehrlich stellen. Wir haben erlebt, wie die westlichen Medien über die Kriege in Afghanistan und dem Irak am Anfang dieses Jahrhunderts in live TV Sendungen Bericht erstatteten. Wir sehen derzeit den gleichen Vorgang in den russischen Medien. RT (Russia Today) kündigte an, dass die Invasion zur Entnazifizierung der Ukraine erfolgte. Das ist nur ein Spiegelbild des „War on Terror“ während der Bush-Regierung. Nur Chauvinisten werden von diesem parteiischen Journalismus überzeugt sein.

Obwohl Deutschland nun eine Rot-Grün-Gelbe Regierung hat, garantiert das keine friedliche Außenpolitik. Eine Rot-Grüne Regierung unterstützte bereitwillig Deutschlands erste Militärintervention seit dem zweiten Weltkrieg und bombardierte das ehemalige Jugoslawien und Afghanistan. Die Deutsche Regierung hat gerade mit der langjährigen Praxis der Nichtentsendung von Waffen in Konfliktzonen gebrochen. Deutsche Waffen in die Ukraine zu senden heißt nur, Öl ins Feuer zu schütten.

Wir haben folgende Forderungen:

  • Stoppt den Krieg
  • Stoppt die russische Aggression gegen die Ukraine
  • Deutschland sollte sicheren Durchgang und Zuflucht für Deserteure und andere Flüchtlinge aus der Ukraine ohne wenn und aber bieten
  • Deutschland nimmt alle Flüchtlinge auf, ob sie Ukrainer, Afghanen, Syrer, Jemeniten oder Somalier sind und stellt die gleiche Unterstützung für alle bereit
  • Die NATO Truppen müssen sich aus Osteuropa zurückziehen
  • Deutschland sollte die NATO als einen Schritt hin zu ihrer Auflösung verlassen
  • Demilitarisierung Europas
  • Bessere Kontrolle über alle imperialistische Propaganda
  • Beschleunigung des Übergangs zu erneuerbaren Energien um die Abhängigkeit Deutschlands von russischem Gas zu durchbrechen

Wir rufen alle Mitglieder und Unterstützer von DIE LINKE Berlin Internationals dazu auf, an Demonstrationen für Frieden, eine Waffenruhe und Abrüstung teilzunehmen.

Die internationale Antikriegsbewegung steht vereint. Hoch die internationale Solidarität!

A century later: the origins of fascism in Italy.

100 years after Mussolini’s March on Rome, how can we understand Fascism?


27/02/2022

In this brief contribution to the cultural debate of The Left Berlin, I will not hide that I found the drafting of this contribution challenging. This was due the complexity of the topic and quantity of studies that, over the years have undertaken to explain the fascist phenomenon.

I will thus try, to present, 100 years after the Marcia su Roma coup d’état, what is to be meant by fascism and to describe its class nature.

Italian fascism presents some peculiarities reflecting the specific situation of the country at the ending of the First World War. In Italy, the fascist movement took the form neither of an intellectual minority tendency, as in France [1]; nor of a mass political force legitimating its societal hegemony in the electoral arena, as in Germany [2]. We should remember that from the very beginning, as the then secretary of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) Palmiro Togliatti said in his popular “Course on the adversaries” – that it would be a mistake to believe that what was true for Italy – should be true and fitting all the other contexts. Fascism can take different shapes in different countries [3].

Over the first Post-War period, Italy was shaken by deep social and political upheavals. The chronic crisis of the liberal institutions was only the exterior, superficial, aspect of the inadequacy of a bourgeois democracy regime that could not face challenges posed by the likely radical, paradigmatic change following the October Revolution in Russia and the spreading revolutionary wave on a continental scale. Guided by their organizations, workers and peasants, that more than anybody else had borne the war catastrophe, acquired a political awareness that guided them in the elaboration of increasingly advanced demands.

The toughening of the class struggle led the Italian bourgeoisie to question itself on the most effective modes and forms of response. Fascism was born, in this perspective, as the most aggressive and regressive form used by the national capitalist class to repress the workers’ demands that threatened its very existence. The workers had been taught by the historical lesson of the soviets.

It is important to underline an aspect still overlooked in the analysis on the origins of fascism. Too often, even in left political discourse, there is the tendency to value some “schematic” and rather dogmatic theses. These were also criticized in 1935 by Togliatti when commenting on the judgment on the origins of fascism given by the social democrats and the German communist movement. Such perspectives reflect a fondness to see fascism narrowly, as an organized expression solely of the petit bourgeoisie, terrified by the real prospect of mass impoverishment stemming from the economic crisis following the First World War. Fascism was certainly a mass movement in which the reactionary petit bourgeoisie found fertile ground for building a political anti-worker platform.

However, fascism was also something else, which cannot be studied separately from imperialism. In what sense? As  Togliatti said, in order to understand fascism, we need “to connect two elements: the bourgeois dictatorship and the movement of the petit bourgeois masses” [4]

It is  in this bright application of dialectical materialism as an interpretive key of the real course of events, that – from my point of view – is the core of the matter. On the one hand, Fascism presents itself as a mass movement that managed to organize the petit bourgeoisie thanks to an eclectic and confused ideology (going from the most extreme forms of nationalism, to illusory and only apparently anti-capitalistic proposals in the economic sphere). On the other hand, fascism also grew in synergy with great financial capital, with the same big bourgeoisie that, at least in words fascism claimed to be fighting against. That was according to the fascist political manifesto of 1919.

The political program of the National Fascist Party, was influenced by the general orientations expressed by the big bourgeoisie. They –  feeling the threat to Italian capitalism posed by the workers’ advancements during the Biennio Rosso (1919-1921), tried to pursue different paths to end the impasse [5]. In this course of events, the Mussolini coup d’état of 1922 was identified as the best path to defeat the workers’ movement, although, as reminded by the history of the 20th century, only temporarily.

Footnotes

1 S. Berstein, „Fascism and anti-fascism in France from the Twenties until 1945”, in Antifascismo e identità europea, A. De Bernardi, P. Ferrari, Carocci, Roma, 2004, p. 109.

2 Particularly significant are the words of the German historian Lutz Klinkhammer: “The German people was not the first victim of Nazism”. Cfr. L. Klinkhammer, “The youth resistance against the national socialist regime”, in Antifascismo e identità europea, A. De Bernardi, P. Ferrari, Carocci, Roma 2004, pp. 135-153.

3 P. Togliatti, „Course on the adversaries”, in P. Togliatti, Opere, vol. III/2, E. Ragionieri, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1973, p. 534.

4 P. 533.

 5 P. 546-49.

“Real life, when it has passed, inclines towards obscurity”

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet is riddled with an analysis of class, misogyny and political compromise


26/02/2022

I.

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet is an international sensation. The depth of the storyline, its vivid descriptions of feeling, its frantic pace, and the intricacy of Neapolitan culture interwoven into the personal narratives have been discussed, dissected, and showered with praise by better writers than myself.

Yet what has been overlooked is an adequate appraisal of the politics that emanates at each step. Whether it is the force of the dominant ideology, limited space in columns or complacency about history that causes reviewers to overlook the fascinating political currents running through the quartet, they deserve attention for a modern left that is perpetually haunted by the ghosts of its past iterations. In this sense, the quartet functions as a history lesson on an understudied polity: post-war Italy.

The tumultuous, tragic lives of Lenu (Elena Greco) and Lila (Raffella Cerullo) are shaped by the tug of war between ascendant communism and the unspoken union between Christian Democracy and organised crime. Born into an impoverished, working-class neighbourhood of Naples under the shadow of the “two great forces of Italian reaction”, the two girls find in each other a source of intellectual and moral sustenance.

It begins with Lila throwing Lenu’s doll into a cellar belonging to the dreaded Camorrist loan shark of the neighbourhood, Don Achille Carracci. Lenu retaliates in kind. Lila forces Lenu to go with her to demand their dolls back from Don Achille. Walking up the stairs to Don Achille’s apartment, Lila offers her hand to encourage Lenu and, though deeply afraid of what the terrifying man might do, Lenu grasps it. Their fates would be intertwined for the next six decades.

When Don Achille is confronted by Lila, he is amused by her boldness and gives the girls some money to buy new dolls, but they buy instead a used copy of ‘Little Women’. A creative and literary passion within the two girls starts, with Lenu acutely self-aware of her intellectual shortcomings. It inspires a contest between the two to read voraciously from the school library and they push each other to excel academically.

For a Global North generation born after the “end of history”, it is difficult to grasp the life-changing impact of social guarantees like schooling. The distinctly feminist lesson of the quartet manifests through the educational divergence between the two. Though Lenu is acutely aware that her friend is the true prodigy, possessing an intellect and a will that is uncontainable, it is Lenu’s parents who, after rancorous quarrels, support her education after the age of 12. Lila’s family recognises no financial benefit of paying for a girl’s education through books and stationery. Their fates diverge even if their friendship remains. Ferrante effortlessly melds the themes of class and patriarchy into one.

Lenu goes on to excel and eventually study at the Normale in Pisa, publishing successful novels and writing columns for national newspapers, while her friend sees her passions steadily ground under the mill of misogyny and poverty. Yet she gravitates back to the culture of the stradone and her childhood milieu. Chief among whom is Nino Sarratore, The brilliant son of part-time poet and journalist Donato Sarratore. Both men have a profound influence on Lenu’s intellectual passions, with Nino serving as an object of desire for both Lila and Lenu.

II.

Reading about Lenu’s exceptional rise into a petit bourgeois milieu from the humblest beginnings reminded me of an excellent essay by John Merrick discussing the conflicts of working-class achievement. The character’s infiltration of the bourgeois society of Italy is intensely unsettling and she resists, with varying degrees of success, to not let herself be unmoored from the stradone of Naples.

The central marker of this cultural gulf is expressed through the Neapolitan dialect, which serves as a private language for the purest interlocution of thoughts between the inhabitants of the neighbourhood and also as a target for class prejudices – something that Lenu is continually subjected to due to the imperfection of her adopted visage of refinement. Consequently, she experiences the inner conflicts of pursuing dreams in a world where those of her ilk are forbidden to dream, of inhabiting exalted spaces designed to exclude her, to achieve ends that become more ephemeral the closer she gets to achieving them.

Today, regional and linguistic distinctions often enshrine a system of class-cultural stratification, fomenting resentments that find terrible expression through the ascendant far-right in the absence of a coherent leftist movement like that of the PCI (Italian Communist Party). The social and cultural divide that grows in today’s societies requires us to understand and empathise with the web of emotions that working people feel and are made to feel, as modernity drags them through the seas of change like a forgotten appendage.

Ferrante’s literary style inverts the standard depiction of political narratives, where political actors and events are central and participating characters peripheral. Instead we are given minimal exposure to the political heavyweights of the era such as Rudi Dutschke, Enrico Berlinguer, Aldo Moro, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. We experience the 1968 movement as an individual situated in the period mixed in with the tumults of ordinary life, giving the narrative a pedagogical quality.

III.

To what extent was Lila’s intellectual promise destroyed by the misogyny that prevailed in deeply conservative Catholic Italy? Entire episodes in the story made me reminisce about family and social life in my native Pakistan. Perhaps Pakistanis and Italians are not so different and we simply exist in a state of asynchronicity. But what about the deep poverty described in the novel? Lila is incredibly bright, but on account of her being female her intelligence goes unrecognised and uninvested. Would a more mediocre and male Lila be given the chance to flourish?

Enzo Scanno, the son of the fruit seller who returns traumatised from military service, becomes a successful IT professional despite his childhood reputation as the class dunce. Yet he would be the first to credit his success to the brilliance of Lila’s tutelage and creativity. It is the grit of this exceptional woman that breaks through the class ceiling society imposes upon her, and perhaps in the process robbing the working class of an organic leader. We would be remiss if we were to assume the totality of patriarchy in deciding the fate of Ferrante’s women: Lila defies containment. She spends her entire life in Naples, yet her spirit and her acts are felt across borders. Her geographical confinement proves no hindrance to her evolution. This uncontainable nature echoes Beauvoirian ideas of woman. A woman that is at various times impetuous, imperious, and indifferent. Envious, competitive, and mean. Yet enduringly loyal, generous with her time and money, determined to surmount the socioeconomic challenges of Naples, the neighbourhood, her own conservative family, and the Camorrist brothers who threaten her life and her livelihood. Though men try to break her through physical, economic, and sexual abuse, she defies them and exacts in due time her revenge.

She is not a woman, but Woman; in all the multiplicity of Woman. In her defiant multiplicity is expressed a feminist message that demands that women be able to practice their full subjectivity without constraints. That they may not be Vestal maidens, doting mothers, loyal companions, resilient fighters or any combination thereof. This yearning to be uncontainable is a powerful (re)expression of second-wave feminism. These are lost lessons that demand reiteration for a new generation to appraise them and shape their thinking.

IV.

Ferrante reveals the evolution of work in Italy after the war through the lens of proletarian life. We see Lila’s father start out as a cottage entrepreneur, making and repairing shoes, while the wealthier Solaras make money through a pastry shop and loansharking, among other unknown criminal enterprises. Sandwiched in between is the upwardly mobile son of Don Achille, Stefano Carracci, who runs a grocery store and harbours ambitions to expand. These ambitions of upward mobility spur him to enter financial agreements with the Solaras, a choice that will seed his ruin. Three sets of entrepreneurs with contradictory interests, that are resolved in time with the Solaras totally dominating the other two.

Workers and their working conditions feature prominently, with Lila’s life of toil in the Soccavo sausage factory providing a grim insight into an all-too-often romanticised industrial working-class existence. We learn through Lila’s organising in the workplace how solidarity is never guaranteed, but won through blood and sweat – quite literally. The union of fascism, bosses, and organised crime becomes logically consistent when we witness the confluence of their economic interests. The working class is never supine and it resists through militancy in the workplace and beyond, most sharply through the Red Brigades that capture and execute the Christian Democrat Prime Minister Aldo Moro.

In the interwoven narration of this shocking historical event, orchestrated in the aftermath of the Historic Compromise between the PCI and the Christian Democrats, the intellectual tensions of timeless leftist debates are brought to the fore. An upwardly mobile petit bourgeois intellectual strata starts to form and perhaps the Red Brigades were acutely aware of the splintering this would inspire in the politics of the Italian working class, foreshadowing the dissolution of the PCI itself. Seen in this light, the execution of Moro seems like a desperate act in the face of modernity’s unceasing encroachment on their present. Lila and Enzo are beginning their careers as IT specialists in the same period, finally escaping the economic confines of working-class destitution even though they remain wedded to the social sanctuary of their neighbourhood.

The march of modernity, the “necessary” political compromises it would entail, the visions of a more prosperous future unfettered by the paralysing war of aggression between left and right; these themes find their expression most faithfully through Nino Sarratore. He encapsulates the essence of the third way that would come to dominate the long 90s. The social and romantic carnage left in his wake in the lives of Lila and Lenu mirror his political evolution. In the words of Lenu’s mother-in-law, the quintessential left bourgeois intellectual Adele Airota, ‘for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else’.

Nino’s arriviste character leads him to the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The third way will eventually prevail and Nino will be one of its self-aggrandising leaders. The PCI would dissolve itself in 1991.

V.

History, when it has passed, inclines towards obscurity, not clarity. It is part of the left’s function to remember beyond the ordinary lifespans of humans, to bear the torch that illuminates the past and to craft a narrative of it that makes it vivid. Ferrante does this through the urgent realism of her narrative. For us on the left she has gifted us with words that can help us explain, relate, and articulate a narrative for our present, unceasing, encroaching modernity. We are the generation that succeeds her characters and so through this insight into their history, we may learn to practice that optimism of the will that Gramsci had advocated a generation earlier.

Editor’s note: for further reading on Gramsci’s analysis of fascism, we recommend the following texts:

The Long March of The Belgian Workers’ Party

How a left wing party has been able to gain support in times of austerity and pandemic


24/02/2022

One big story dominated coverage of the 2019 Belgian elections: the fascist Vlaams Belang (Flemish Importance) was back as a relevant party, taking just over 19% of the Flemish vote, thus increasing their seat count in the federal parliament by 15 to a grand total of 18 (out of 150 total). This sadly overshadowed the second big winner of the night, the radical left wing Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB), which achieved their best electoral result ever and finally achieved their electoral breakthrough in Flanders.

After returning their first ever two MPs to parliament in 2014 (both coming from the French speaking region of Wallonia) and a strong showing in the 2018 local elections, one of the main goals of the Workers’ Party was finally clearing the electoral threshold in Flanders. And they succeeded. The party’s seat count went from two to twelve, returning MPs from all regions of the country for the first time. In addition, they gained representation in all regional parliaments (Flanders, Brussels, Wallonia) and gained one European MP with Marc Botenga. In total, the party captured 8.6% of the national vote.

Victory speech, 2019 election. Photo: PTB. CC2.0

L’Union Fait La Force

One of the peculiarities of the Belgian political system is it’s division along language lines. In the 1970’s, all existing major parties split into a Flemish (Dutch speaking) and Walloon (French speaking) party. This resulted in a fragmented political landscape, with 12 parties represented in parliament today. Currently, the Workers’ Party is the only unitary party with parliamentary representation, competing in elections on both sides of the language barrier, providing an important counterweight to the growing right wing separatism in Flanders. 

This does not just translate to electoral politics. When french-speaking Belgium was hit by heavy flooding in July resulting in 41 deaths, the party organized SolidariTeams, sending buses filled with volunteers, as well as collecting much needed supplies for the affected area and providing warm food for those who lost electricity and gas. Large amounts of this help came from Flanders, and together with other similar initiatives and volunteers, they continue to this day to help with the cleanup. Meanwhile in parliament, they continue to call for more aid for the victims, many of which still live in damp, mold ridden homes. Meanwhile they continue to argue for a radical and ambitious climate policy. 

Peter Mertens, at the time president of the party, helping with the cleanup. Photo: PTB. CC2.0

Medicine For The People

It’s almost impossible not to mention healthcare during a global pandemic. Since 1971, the PTB has been running a network of healthcare centers, called Medicine for the People, offering free medical care at the point of use. In addition, they lead the charge in campaigns for cheaper medicine and against industrial pollution, having cut their teeth in 1970’s during the fight against lead poisoning caused by mining giant Union Minière (now Umicore) in the town of Hoboken. 

When Covid-19 hit in February 2020, Medicine for the People helped organize mass testing, distributed facemasks and set up an effective contract tracing network at a local level, at a time when the government failed to effectively organize this themselves. In addition, they started campaigning for lifting the patents on vaccines, stricter sanctions for companies not complying with home office rules and for more funds towards the healthcare sector. 

Mass testing of a care home by Medicine for the People, April 2020. Photo: PTB. CC2.0

Medicine for the People is a prime example of the philosophy of the PTB to carry the reality in the streets into parliament, building organizations to listen to and help people in a local manner while fighting for structural change at the top. Quite a few doctors now hold seats in parliament or local councils for the party, with one, Sofie Mercx, recently becoming the leader of the party’s federal parliamentary group.

Currently, there are 11 of these healthcare centers throughout the country, all situated in working class neighborhoods. Together with so-called ‘Base Groups’ that operate at a very local level in which members can participate, as well as through their youth organizations COMAC and RedFox, these initiatives provide a way to listen to people and adjust policy dynamically. Every September, the party organizes a music/political festival called ‘ManiFiesta’, in which all these party organizations participate. But it’s not just party run organizations that have stands there: unions and civilian initiatives (like Hart Boven Hard, founded against the austerity measures of the previous government) also participate and have stands at the festival.

An Effective Opposition

As of October 2020, after a government formation that lasted 493 days, Belgium is governed by a broad centrist coalition of no less than seven parties, including liberals, social democrats, greens and Christian democrats. From the right, the two Flemish separatist parties (one fascist, one slightly more ‘moderate’), try to delegitimize the government, claiming it is undemocratic because it doesn’t have a majority in Flanders. On the left, the PTB forms the opposition. 

Despite being in opposition, the PTB has managed to secure some notable victories. In 2019, the party campaigned heavily for a minimum pension of 1500 euros/month, bringing it to the center of the political debate. Other parties, including the Christian democrats and the even right wing liberals, quickly started adopting the proposal in their platforms. In addition, the party launched a successful petition to bring the proposal forward in parliament through a “citizen’s law”. And while parliament rejected it, the new government formed in the next year pledged to increase the minimum pensions, although more modestly.

In late 2019, while the government formation was still ongoing and parliament had to enact an emergency budget to prevent a US-style government shutdown, the PTB staged an upset and managed to push through an amendment of 67 million Euros in additional funds for the healthcare sector. This is estimated to have created 4.500 new jobs, which proved very valuable in the fight against the pandemic.

Very recently, amidst surging energy prices, the party relaunched an issue they have been campaigning for since 2007, namely to reduce the VAT on energy and gas from 21% (the same level as caviar and champagne) to 6%. Despite rejecting the proposal in September, the Christian Democrat minister of finance backed it as a possible solution in January. Soon, other parties followed in their support, with some putting forward alternative measures to lower energy prices. A few weeks ago, the government announced that they would be reducing VAT on electricity (temporarily, only for 4 months in spring), but unfortunately not for gas. While the measures the government took are laughable at best, and the PTB has fiercely criticized them as insufficient, they do show that the debate is at least shifting. The party has vowed to keep up the pressure and is organizing a protest march at the end of February.

Overall, on a number of issues, the Workers’ Party has managed to pull the debate to the left, fiercely attacking neoliberal policies and putting pressure on other left wing parties to hold true to their principles. The Walloon Socialist Party (PS) is especially wary of strong PTB polling in the south of the country. Especially worrying is the growing influence of the party in the labor movement, especially in the PS aligned socialist union FGTB. 

New President, Same Direction

In December 2021, Peter Mertens, party president since 2008, did not seek reelection for another term as PTB president and was succeeded by then spokesperson and leader of the parliamentary party Raoul Hedebouw. 

Current party president Raoul Hedebouw and MP Greet Daems. Photo DimiTalen CC1.0

Mertens left the role of president while the party is polling at an all time high. He was the one that reformed the party from one that was dogmatic and sectarian into the dynamic 21st century Marxist party that it is today, resulting in electoral success. He still remains very much involved with the party, taking up the position as general secretary. The main reason cited for taking a step back was to focus more on broader policy lines, spending more time on writing and not wanting to deal with the squabbles of day to day politics anymore. 

Hailing from Wallonia, Raoul Hedebouw has set forward a course very similar to that of Mertens, with an additional focus on giving workers and the youth a bigger place within the party (currently, four out of 12 PTB MPs are workers). Hedebouw is perfectly bilingual and his parliamentary interventions, in which he switches from Dutch to French constantly, are widely shared across social media. 

Towards 2024

One of the main criticisms aimed at the party by the other parties on the left is that it would be unwilling to compromise and prefers opposition over government. The PTB’s stance has always been that it is more than willing to negotiate, provided red lines aren’t crossed. When pressed recently on television on what these red lines are, Raoul Hedebouw said they include reducing the pension age back to 65 as well as reducing the VAT on energy and not splitting up the country more. In addition, he mentioned that while compromises will have to be made and that one can’t implement their entire program, principles can’t be thrown out of the window just for the sake of governing. He also spoke against working with Flemish separatists and liberals, and that alliances will have to be found within the left.

On multiple occasions, especially in the Flemish regional parliament where the greens and social democrats are also in opposition, the three parties of the left have collaborated against the right wing government. In 2019 however, coalition talks for a PS (social democrat), Ecolo (greens) and the PTB for the Walloon regional government broke down, after the PTB claimed that the PS was not willing to fundamentally change things. In Wallonia, there have also been several attempts at forming local coalitions between the PS and PTB, but all of these talks broke down. Most notably in cities like Liege, where one of the main reasons cited by the PTB was the lack of new investments in social housing and public services. Meanwhile the PS claimed the PTB program couldn’t be paid for and that the party wanted “to revolt against higher levels of government”. Thus, talks broke down, despite calls by the influential socialist union FGTB for a left wing coalition. 

Currently in Flanders, on a local level, the PTB is participating in a red red green coalition in Borgerhout (a district of Antwerp) and as a junior coalition partner to the social democrats in the small industrial town of Zelzate. Cooperation appears to have yielded positive results, with the coalition increasing taxes on big industry while reducing them for small businesses, as well as investing more funds into fighting poverty. 

Zelzate Town Hall. Photo: Spotter2 CC4.0

If current polling holds, the party would win 19 seats (increasing their total by seven), overtaking the Greens for the first time in Flanders and approaching the 20% mark in Wallonia. This would make them the third party in parliament. However, the elections are only set for 2024 (provided the government doesn’t collapse) and a lot can happen before then. More worrying is the fascist VB polling at nearly 25% in Flanders and becoming the biggest party in the federal parliament. In addition, they might be able to acquire a majority together with the N-VA (New Flemish Alliance, more moderate right wing separatists), which could see the cordon sanitaire broken for the first time.

To do so, the PTB has been focusing on exposing the hypocrisies of the VB, who claim to be a social party that listens to the concerns of common people. On many occasions, VB has voted against the policies that they claim to support, like when they voted against a PTB proposal to reduce the wages of deputies and they voted against raising the minimum wage. While of course strongly condemning the racism and punch down attitude of the VB, the PTB wants to reach out to VB voters and listen to their concerns about social issues, not demonize them simply as racist and backwards. PTB social media ads target VB voters frequently. The party sees it as their goal to bring back VB voters to the left, after many abandoned the traditional parties over the past few decades.

2024 will see elections for all levels of government, from local to European. Covid-19 has painfully highlighted the weaknesses within the Belgian political system and showed the failures of the decades of decentralization to the regions. With challenges like climate change looming ahead (highlighted by the disastrous floods of the summer), Belgium needs unity more than ever. Far right separatism doesn’t provide an answer to these problems. As the only unitary party, the Workers’ Party of Belgium could and has to play in countering VB’s separatism and racism with a social, inclusive and authentic left wing vision in 2024.

News from Berlin and Germany, 24th February 2022

Weekly news round-up from Berlin and Germany


NEWS FROM BERLIN

Hundreds of people show solidarity with Dilan in Berlin

When Dilan was beaten up in Berlin, no one intervened. Now hundreds of people declared their solidarity with her and other victims of racist violence at a demonstration. The teenager herself was also there last Sunday. According to the police, the demonstration started at the Greifswalder Straße S-Bahn station with about 800 participants. This was significantly more than the number registered. There were banners where was written “Racism is not an opinion, but a crime,” or “Racism has many faces, but all of them are ugly”. Meanwhile, Berlin’s Interior Senator Iris Spranger said “Such cases are first and foremost shocking, and they must not happen.” Source: rbb.

“Everything that happened before has been exceeded”

“Antonia” has not yet subsided. Nevertheless, the Berlin fire brigade draws a first conclusion of the storm’s nights. Fire chief Karsten Homrighausen spoke of a “mammoth task” for the firefighters. The Berlin fire brigade has been called out on 4,000 occasions since Thursday because of the storm. A record of 15,000 emergency calls were received in 88 hours. Otherwise, there were 2,500 emergency calls in 24 hours. At the same time, a peak of 1,000 firefighters were on duty, including many volunteers. Almost 150 fire engines were manned. The scale of the disaster was “beyond anything we have ever seen before”, Homrighausen said. Source: rbb.

Protests in front of Russian embassy in Berlin

Following the invasion of Russian troops into eastern Ukraine, several groups in Berlin have announced protests in front of the Russian embassy. The Berlin police registered three registered events so far. President Putin has declared his intention to recognise the independence of the self-proclaimed “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. In response to the invasion, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) said on Tuesday the certification of the gas pipeline “Nord Stream 2” would be temporarily suspended. Also, politicians in Berlin and Brandenburg have strongly condemned the latest Russian actions in the Ukraine conflict. Most of them accused Russia of breaking international law. Source: rbb.

 

NEWS FROM GERMANY

Almost all COVID measures to be scrapped by March 20 in Germany

From March 20 on, most COVID restrictions are to be relaxed. Some federal states have already pressed forward with lifting 2G restrictions in non-essential shops, where patrons will just need to wear a medical mask, unless exempt. Some contact restrictions will also be scrapped. From March 4 onwards, 2G rules would be replaced by 3G rules in restaurants. Nightclubs will also be allowed to reopen, under 2G plus rules. From March 20 (the “Freedom Day”), there is a chance the only restriction that will stay in place is the obligation to wear a mask indoors as well as on public transport. Source: I am Expat.

South Africa finally wants vaccine patent release

South Africa’s President has called for a patent release for Corona vaccines during a joint European Union (EU) and African Union (AU) summit. It is unacceptable that Africa always has to take a back seat when it comes to medicines, said Cyril Ramaphosa, the AU representative for the Corona pandemic. Donations alone are not a sustainable way to build resilience, said Ramaphosa again. During the two-day summit, it was announced patent-free mRNA vaccine will be produced in six countries in Africa. But this is not enough for South Africa as the country wants the patent release. Source: rnd.

Hardliner’s Pact: Seal the Borders and Deport

That’s the agenda of a two-day “repatriation conference” that began on Monday at the Hofburg in Vienna. Ministers from 23 Schengen and Western Balkan states, representatives of the EU border protection force Frontex and other EU authorities as well as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) met at the invitation of the Austrian government, which is known for its restrictive migration policy. The right-wing conservative Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) and his German counterpart, the Social Democrat Nancy Faeser, demonstratively presented themselves as quite aligned. Source: jW.

AfD politician causes criticism with statements about trans MPs

AfD deputy party and parliamentary group leader Beatrix von Storch has sparked much criticism across party lines with remarks about trans Bundestag member Tessa Ganserer (“die Grünen”). In a debate on International Women’s Day in the Bundestag, von Storch first accused the majority of MPs in the Bundestag of adhering to a “gender ideology”. Then, using the deadname of MP Ganserer, von Storch said the politician remains a man and if she enters the Bundestag as such “via the Green women’s quota and is listed here as a woman, that is simply illegal”. Source: Zeit.